Medieval Marginalia
Knights versus snails, monkeys with trumpets. Eight hundred years before the meme, the margin was already winning.
- Shelf
- Print & Type
- Archetype
- 03 stacked bars
- Inks
- VermilionGreenBlack
- Suggested format
- A6, pocket, 16 pp.
- Author
- None: set by the system
Format and extent are what the engine suggests for a print run. No copy of this title has been printed.
Catalogue note
Marginalia are the pictures and notes in the margins of a manuscript, around the text rather than in it. In Gothic manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, some of them have no evident link to the text they surround, and one scene comes back so often that the British Library’s manuscripts blog calls it common: an armed knight fighting a snail.
Knight versus snail
Lilian M. C. Randall collected the motif in “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare”, published in Speculum (vol. 37, no. 3, 1962, pp. 358 to 367). Her survey covers more than seventy marginal images from 29 manuscripts, most of them made between about 1290 and 1310. She proposed that the snail stood for the Lombards, in the British Library’s words “a group vilified in the early middle ages for treasonous behaviour, the sin of usury, and ‘non-chivalrous comportment in general’”.
Hers was not the first reading. As early as 1850 the Comte de Bastard took one marginal snail for an image of the Resurrection, because he had found it in two manuscripts next to miniatures of the Raising of Lazarus. Neither reading explains everything: as the British Library points out, the Lombard theory does not say why the knight so often loses, or why the scene turns up in the margins of texts that tell no history, such as Psalters and Books of Hours.
Where to see them
The British Library’s post “Knight v Snail” (25 September 2013) reproduces examples from its own collection, among them the Gorleston Psalter (England, Suffolk, 1310 to 1324, Add MS 49622) and the Smithfield Decretals (southern France, with marginal scenes added in London, about 1300 to 1340, Royal MS 10 E IV).
On this shelf
The engine set this title as stacked bars in vermilion, green and black. Unlike the painter of a margin, it has no text beside it to answer: the only words it receives are the title, and it turns those into a number before drawing anything.
Sources
- Lilian M. C. Randall, “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare (opens in new tab)”, Speculum, vol. 37, no. 3 (1962), pp. 358 to 367. The count of images and manuscripts is from the summary in the Medieval Bestiary bibliography (opens in new tab).
- British Library, Medieval Manuscripts blog, “Knight v Snail (opens in new tab)”, 25 September 2013.
How the engine set it
One sheet per ink, in the order a duplicator would run them: the same separations the generator shows for any word. The title alone decided all of it.
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